In the wastewater treatment and water-recycling processes, the separation and recovery of valuable substances is an important issue internationally. How to obtain useful resources including water and valuable substances from wastewater is a future trend.
Emission water from high-tech industries still contains valuable metals such as gold, indium, gallium, molybdenum, etc. However, these valuable metals are present in a medium or low concentration in large amounts of water and wastewater, and there are many kinds of metal ions in wastewater at low concentration. Therefore, taking the efficiency of selective separation and recovery and environmental friendliness into account, the chemical precipitation method or ion-exchange method at present are not applicable to the recovery of metals from wastewater.
Although the microbial protein has a significant effect on the adsorption of medium to low concentration of metal ions, and has the advantages of specificity, affinity and reversibility, the protein adsorbent is mostly present in a suspended state, and thus a subsequent solid-liquid separation procedure is needed.
Therefore, at present, a novel apparatus and technique for adsorbing valuable metals in a liquid, which can rapidly adsorb valuable metals in the liquid and easily separate the valuable metals from the adsorption apparatus are needed.